In recent times, recess has become threatened by the press for more academic instruction time and by fears of violent behavior. A dramatic indicator of this trend is seen in the increasing number of schools and school districts which have done away with or significantly reduced recess time (BBC news, 2007; Coughlan, 2007; Jarrett, 2002; Pressler,…

This paper aims to outline findings from a research project that has investigated an initiative to stimulate youths to become more entrepreneurial. The concept of summer entrepreneur has been developed in the last decade in a Swedish county. It was developed out of the idea that youths should have a possibility to run their own companies as…

Over the past few years, content developers searching for new markets have found a potentially lucrative consumer base in local and location-based services as new media platforms have begun to "expand" their focus to hyper-local place-based communities. This shift to "local 2.0" has given birth to "local listing sites," an emerging social medium…

This linguistic and ethnographic project examines register formation among a community of Sri Lankan university youth. The Raggers group at the University of Peradeniya (Kandy, Sri Lanka) has strict rules forbidding the use of English and supporting a register of Sinhala made up of linguistic features from different Sinhala varieties. Detailing…

This study examines how Islamists are socially, discursively and linguistically represented in the Egyptian newspaper "al-Ahram." The main question of this study is what would the Egyptian government do to halt the Brothers' political growth and potential threat? To answer this question, the study uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)…

The purpose of this roundtable discussion was to explore factors that influence the design of the initial discussion prompts in course-based, online learning. The initial prompt is one of the first pieces of scaffolding necessary for the knowledge construction requisite in a constructivist learning environment. As a means of stimulating…

The aim of this article is to examine the origin of perceived discrimination as it appears in the discourse of Mapuches living in Temuco and Santiago, and how that discourse is related to the evaluation of "kimeltuwun" (educational knowledge). A qualitative design was used to survey Mapuche emigrants to these two urban centers, where…

This article addresses the question, How do changes in policy discourses shape public representations of literacy learners and the goals of adult literacy education? It examines specifically how the agency of adult literacy learners is constructed. We carry out a critical discourse analysis of two key adult literacy policy documents from the U.K.:…

Citation practice provides justification for arguments and allows a writer to indicate a rhetorical gap for her/his research and adopt a tone of authority. Claims must be supported with evidence, and writers must demonstrate an understanding of approaches and knowledge in their fields of specialisation, in order to persuade the examiners that the…

The purpose of this article is to analyse interaction in academic weblogs, focusing on discursive features that provide cues as to the participants' interpersonal behaviour. The data for this study consisted of postings and their corresponding comments taken from 11 academic weblogs. The analysis of the corpus allowed us to work out a framework of…

The paper reviews public discourses and research on the safeguarding of other people's children by adults at the neighbourhood level. There is much empirical evidence pointing to the existence of thriving informal communities of support and informal childcare for parents across the social classes. There appears to be less empirical evidence…

The present study adds to our understanding of how learners employ lexical and grammatical phenomena to communicate in writing in different types of interlanguage discourse. A multidimensional (factor) analysis of a corpus of L2 Spanish writing (202,241 words) generated by second- and third-year, university-level learners was performed. The…

In this article, we draw on research with Hmong American community members to contribute to a more complex understanding of Hmong culture. Specifically, in a critical discourse analysis of interviews with 3 influential Hmong American politicians, we highlight the divergent perspectives on early marriage, Hmong gender norms, and the struggles of…

This article examines the "master" and "little" cultural narratives students perform in literacy narratives. Results show that students incorporate the literacy-equals-success master narrative most often, yet they also include in little narratives figures such as the hero, victim, and child prodigy. I consider how these findings can improve…

There are individual differences in the amount and type of vocabulary that adults produce to young children in the home environment before the children enter school. How many words a mother knows is a significant predictor of a child's vocabulary. The current study addressed the question of whether there were individual differences in the amount…